Abstract
Subjective probability judgments of two mutually exclusive and exhaustive events were investigated. Previous research has documented binary complementarity, that is, such judgments typically sum up to 1.00 in accordance with standard probability theories. However, I argue here that three hypotheses collectively specify conditions wherein systematic binary noncomplementarity is observed. Hypothesis 1 assumes that a possibility that an Example X does not belong to a Category C is assessed by dissimilarity calculation between X and C. According to Hypothesis 2, if X were both similar and dissimilar to C, then the probabilities that X belongs to C and that X does not belong to C would be judged high enough that their sum exceeds 1.00. Hypothesis 3 speculates that such normative contradiction occurs contingent upon task-dependent subjective weighting of relevant features. Experiments 1 through 5 confirmed Hypotheses 1 through 3. Analysis of subjective weight estimates revealed that the compatibility principle (Slovic, Griffin, & Tversky, 1990) provided a coherent account for such violation of probabilistic norms.
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